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Scott Adams

I spoke to Scott Adams, who is best known as the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, the immensely popular comic creation launched in 1989. The strip is enjoyed daily by 150 million people in 1,900 newspapers, in 56 countries. His first book, The Dilbert Principle, became a number one New York Times best seller and one of the top selling business books of all time. Over 10 million Dilbert books have been sold, including four business titles and twelve comic reprint collections. The Dilbert Zone web site, managed by United Media, was the first syndicated comic strip site on the web, and one of the first web sites to turn a profit.

How did you accidentally fall into your career path and how has your job changed over time?

It depends what you mean by accidentally.

A few weeks after graduating college, age 21, I designed a two-pronged career strategy. I still have the diary in which I recorded the plan. The first prong involved pursuing a traditional corporate career and learning as much as I could about the world of business. I figured I needed that skillset no matter where my career went.

The second prong involved trying a variety of side projects that all had the same basic characteristics: 1) They required creativity, which I felt was in my wheelhouse, 2) Failure would cost me nothing but time and embarrassment, and 3) Whatever product I created could be easily reproduced so there would be no upside cap on my earnings potential.

My failed side projects involved pursuing several inventions that didn’t work out, programming several computer games that never went anywhere, and writing a meditation guide that no one bought. Cartooning was the first of my side projects that took off. And as I predicted, the business skills I learned in the corporate world have been invaluable in building the Dilbert brand.

I still use the same career strategy I wrote in my diary decades ago. For example, this year I’m a co-founder of a start-up that makes scheduling easy, called CalendarTree. And I wrote a non-Dilbert book on the topic of success, called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Sort of the Story of my Life. Both projects required creativity and both have an uncapped upside potential. If they don’t work out, all I lose is time and perhaps some dignity that I wasn’t using anyway. But if either project succeeds, there is no cap on their potential.

Why do you say that goals are for losers? If you don't set goals, how are you know what you're supposed to achieve?

The best way to answer that is with some examples. Losing ten pounds is a goal, whereas learning to eat right is a system. Writing a best-selling book is a goal, whereas practicing your writing every day for an hour is a system. Getting your boss’s job is a goal, whereas continuously improving your skills and knowledge is a system.

The problem with goals, in my opinion, is that they can be demotivating because progress is often imperceptibly slow. But if you employ a system, you’ll have a sense of achievement every day. We humans need that to keep our energy and spirits high. And if you pick a smart system, you’ll make it easier for luck to find you, possibly in ways that your goals did not anticipate.

I’m not entirely anti-goal. Goals can help you focus and they provide direction. My point is that your systems are what matter most.

We are told that you have to maximize your strengths. Why do you think otherwise?

If you have some sort of world-class skill, such as playing the piano or hitting a baseball, it might make perfect sense to focus your energy on that one thing. But for 99.9% of people, your best strategy is to develop merely “good” skills in a variety of compatible fields. For example, I’m a mediocre artist at best, and I’m usually not the funniest person in the room. But the combination of my meager art talent and my funny-enough writing, plus a few other modest skills, allow me to be one of the most commercially successful cartoonists on the planet.

Take a good look at the successful people you know. I’ll bet they have a useful combination of good-enough skills but no world-class skills.